I'm wondering if these latest developments might have some influence on Sony's plans for their next console. Since this generation is pretty much fucked for them I wonder if this is going to spur them into rushing out their next console sooner than they otherwise would have. They were talking about a 10 year lifecycle for the thing, but its only 4 years old and its now completely open to anyone and everyone. Would they really want to carry on for another 6+ years with something where piracy is now unstoppable and rampant?
Nintendo and Microsoft surely have their successor consoles in the works and likely to be released in the near future, so I was doubtful about that 10 year lifecycle thing to begin with, but now that the PS3 is hacked and as easily accessible as Lindsay Lohan after a few drinks, you'd think Sony would want to move on even more. It is a shame though (for them), because from what I understand they were just finally getting around to it being profitable. Oh well.
On a somewhat brighter note, this news might actually boost PS3 hardware sales. Now granted, many of those sales may be to people only interested in pirating/homebrew/linux, but I read somewhere the PS3 manufacturing costs are down to $240 which means at $299 they are no longer losing money on the hardware, and actually making some profit. So even if people are buying the hardware without buying any games its still profit for Sony on some level.
Doesn't matter if they turn off updates and everything, the original PS3 models are *extremely* faulty, and I'd be surprised if half of the PS3s that the USAF bought back in the day are still working.
I was thinking that same thing myself. And its going to be next to impossible to find working original model PS3s which haven't had their firmware's upgraded past 3.21 (or whatever the cutoff version was) in order to replace the dead units. I would imagine they see far heavier usage than an average consumer would put theirs through.